Information is the life blood of an enterprise. The advent of technology has allowed information to be collected in real time and has allowed for the quantity and variety of information to appear boundless. An enterprise will collect, organize, analyze, mine, and report its information in an attempt to better plan and operate the enterprise. The information may also be used to increase knowledge of customers to thereby increase customer loyalty and revenues.
One challenge with the abundance of information is processing large volumes of data in practical and useful time frames. Another challenge is integrating information that may be housed in a variety of different databases, tables, or locations and keeping that information in synchronization.
When information is integrated if can provide valuable insights to the enterprise. One technique for this is for an enterprise to place pointers or links in one data store table to point to another data store table that is being integrated or linked in some logical fashion. These links can grow very large and span multiple tables and perhaps data sources. If a single element in one of the table's changes, then each table in the list has to be visited and updated to reflect the new change. This can create a serious synchronization bottleneck and is especially problematic when versioning of information is being maintained within each of the independent tables, such that when a change is made the previous version is still maintained as a prior version.
Thus, it can be seen that improved techniques for synchronizing data are desirable.